HOLD GREEN LIGHT AWAIT FOG

PREVENT HAPPY WAGON AND SO ON

What in blazes did that mean?

Happy wagon?

Pimms Section raced Madeira home beneath the February moon, beating up the German Navy halfway to Norway. We were out of settings for the cipher machine, but the last January messages we’d picked up were just beginning to play out. This was a fairly ordinary op and hadn’t been mentioned in the code—we dropped a lot of high explosive on a lot of German ships—a Madeira flight crew actually hit one. The ones we didn’t hit fired a lot of antiaircraft guns back at us. We didn’t hang about after our bombs were gone. It was a long flight, and the navigation was hard work—Chip didn’t dare transmit for bearings because we were so close to Norway, so Silver had to stare at the stars. We were knackered by the time we made it safely back to Windyedge.

Wonderful to see the green glow of the Kingsleap Light guiding us in. I touched down ahead of the other planes, braked, adjusted the power, and turned to taxi back to the hangar. The weird Enigma message was still nagging at me.

PREVENT HAPPY WAGON AND SO ON

I wondered if it was another translation error, like storm front and Windyedge. What was happy in German? Dratted classical education—all I could think of was Latin.

In Latin, of course, it is felix.

I thumped one fist against the cockpit window, spluttering with the discovery, steering with my feet on the rudder pedals.

But if felix was the Latin translation of “happy,” what did wagon mean? The Latin translation of bear was ursa—baer in German. Like Ursa Major, the Great Bear? The stars we’d been staring at all night? A fragment of The Odyssey came back to me: the Bear, surnamed the Wain…

Of course. The Great Bear. The Wain. If you know what a wain is.

It’s a wagon, of course, and “the Wagon” is what the Germans call the Great Bear.

PREVENT HAPPY WAGON

Wherever Felix Baer was now, the Nazis were onto him.

By mid-morning, when the order came to scramble back into our planes, we were every one of us dead asleep in our bunks.

The Pimms aircraft had been refueled and rearmed. That meant we were the ones who got told to hop to it.

When I’d whipped us up to get the Blenheims out of the firing line the first time Windyedge came under attack, I’d been in my underwear. This time when I leaped out of bed to answer the telephone call from operations, at least I was in my pajamas. I pulled on trousers and boots over top and tripped over Silver pulling on his boots as I turned to haul the blankets off the slumbering Australians.

“What’s going on?” Chip asked, throwing off his own blankets.